Christina Aguilera
Dr. Cynthia Macri
Impediments Essay
When I vote, I will vote Republican for all offices.
Though I do vote straight ballot, my views are not necessarily
one-hundred percent conservative. I
have Republican views when it comes to financial policies, but social issues are
different. When it comes to things
like gay-marriage, abortion, or religion I am slightly on the liberal side.
I feel the government should not be involved in those personal matters so
I do not usually include those things when I talk about my political views.
And while I feel my views come from my own reasoning, I am aware there
are several impediments that have kept me from thinking critically about my
policital belief.
The first impediment to my political thinking is my previous commitments
and previous personal experiences.
Both of my parents are Republican and have raised me to feel the same way.
My father, and his side of the family, has been a bigger influence on my
beliefs. Since I was a little girl
I have always heard him talk about Democrats trying to take our hard earned
money and give it to people who have not worked for it.
I would hear him talk about Bill Clinton taking money from the military
because he was a foolish Democrat and about how amazing Ronald Reagan was.
When I was young I may not have really understood what some of those
things meant, or who Clinton or Reagan was, but as I got older I began to agree
with him. I did not need to fully
understand what it meant to have Republican views because it was all I had ever
known. If someone asked my
policital ideology I would automatically say that I was Republican.
Though it was not only my habit of calling myself a Republican that
inhibited my critical thinking on the matter.
Another serious impediment was my ‘Us versus Them’ thinking.
Listening to my father all those years really engrained this idea of
Republican versus Democrat. Even
when I was a young teenager I felt that Democrats were just hurting American
government. It was not only my
father who influenced this thinking, but also the people around me.
I grew up in a small town in
Along with the
‘us versus them’ impediment, Fox News also reinforced the news impediment.
The news station itself created an unrealistic view of Democratic
ideologies. I now see that the show
would dramatize social issues and bills that were trying to be passed in
The things I
heard in the news and from my peers also led to another impediment to my
critical thinking. Since I grew up
around mostly Republicans, I developed a stereotypical idea of what all
Democrats were like. The few
democrats I knew when I was younger were very liberal and so I felt that all
Democrats were like that. If
someone had asked me when I was younger what Democrats want I would have said
something about how they acted like they wanted to help everybody when they
really just could not stay out of others people’s business.
I would have also said they were not very smart, but now that I am older
my views of Democrats have changed.
I feel high school and college have changed my views a good deal, but I still
have a few generalized thoughts about them that are probably not true for all
Democrats.
The same goes
for my view of Republicans as well.
My mother, for example, is a very conservative person.
Living with her and talking to her about issues had given me this idea of
what all right wing conservatives are like.
I assumed all strict Republicans acted like her, which, I now realize is
not true. She is part of the reason
I swayed from being more conservative with social issues.
Talking to her was difficult and I often felt that if all Republicans
ended up like her then it would be best to try to have a few of my own ideas,
even if I did not talk about them.
Using just her as my example of a strict Republican to justify my differences of
beliefs is not a way to critically think.
An additional
impediment to my thinking about which ideology I practice is my own egocentrism.
It is hard for me to think of others when it comes to my finances.
My parents, the news, and my peers had all enforced the idea that other
political parties will take money you have earned and basically give it away.
This has led me to be really skeptical when it comes to helping others.
I have developed a view where I feel if I can go earn money to pay bills
and buy food then so should everyone else.
There have been times where I honestly said that I did not want my tax
dollars going to people who cling to government plans that let them be lazy and
not work when I worked hard to earn my money.
It is a selfish view, but I cannot seem help it.
My egocentrism led me to feel that being Republican was best because I
had always heard that the political party did not want to carry the rest of the
country if they were not willing to work.
It did not matter to me if that was really true for all Republicans.
What mattered was that I could care only about myself and not feel bad
about it.
The last
impediment to my thinking is the fear I have felt.
It is not easy for people in small southern towns to branch out from the
norm. If your parents, students,
and teachers at school all share Republican ideology it is hard to think
differently. As I aged I had new
ideas about things and new beliefs, but talking about them to anyone would have
been crazy. Until I was a senior in
high school I was too afraid to admit that a lot of the conservative social
issues did not bother me. I am sure
that if I had said anything to a family member or friend about not being a
cookie cut Republican they would have seriously criticized me.
Fitting in was, and is, very important to me.
During that time I kept my thoughts to myself I passed up several chances
to critically review the political beliefs I had.
Even today there are certain political issues I am afraid to talk to a
lot of people about. An example of
an issue I will not talk about is abortion.
This is a serious impediment to my thinking because if I never talk about
an issue than I am missing an opportunity to get more information about it.
Like Gerald
Noisch said in Learning to Think Things Through, “Critical thinking goes
beyond problem solving” (18). For
me to think critically is not just fixing my impediments and moving forward.
There is a lot more to it than that.
I need to analyze myself as a whole and see what things are going to
affect my thinking for everything and not just one topic.
I have thought
about why I believe some of the things I do and I have found there is a common
factor to my impediments. It seems
to me that a lot of the beliefs I have are based on the people around me.
Whether it is something I see on television, observe at school, or hear
at home all my beliefs are influenced by other people.
The things that we experience every day are going to influence our
thinking, but for me I see that there is too few times where I deviate from the
norm. If someone seems to know what
they are talking about I find I am more likely to believe them.
I know I am the kind of person who wants everyone to like me and I do not
like making people angry. That
realization plus my new knowledge on impediments show me why I think the way I
do, or more accurately, why I do not think about some of the things I should.
For me to improve my critical thinking ability I need to question things
more and not rely so much on what other people say.
Works Cited
Noisch, Gerald. Learning to
Think Things Through.
Pearson
Education Inc, 2009.